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An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Trade Representative released its annual Special 301 Report yesterday, unsurprisingly including Canada on the Priority Watch list. While inclusion on the list is designed to generate embarrassment on target countries, Michael Geist explains why this year's report should elicit outrage. Not only is the report lacking in objective analysis, it targets some of the world's poorest countries with no evidence of legal inadequacies and picks fights with any country that dare adopt a contrary view on intellectual property issues."

They're lying, again. They've lied about every. single. point. they made during the election, and there's strong evidence that even the election results themselves are a lie.

They want to have it on the books so that if Beardo is at a protest or starts to make trouble, they can see what Beardo's been doing online and put him in jail or bankrupt him or hell, just embarrass him. Ripping a DVD is a $20k fine and 5 years in prison. Unlocking your nook? Same thing. Installing Ubuntu? Yep, prison. (Okay, you deserve that last one.) Any digital lock on any media cannot be bypassed or that's the penalty. That's not fear-mongering, that's what is in the law. If you buy a DVD and rip it to play on your unlocked iPhone, you're looking at 10+ years in jail. If you burned down Parliament with everyone inside, you'd get out on parole sooner than that.

"We're not going to do this!" means "We don't want you to complain until this is the law."

I'm not going to worry. When I smuggle in crazy ideas about privacy and civil rights, I always use stenography to hide them in PowerPoint presentations describing terrorist plots, and hide them in my underpants.